This past week, Sony and Evolution Studios finally released their beautiful looking racer, DriveClub for PlayStation 4 owners. The big push behind this title was that in addition to the normal retail version, they were also releasing a PlayStation Plus Edition of the game which wouldn’t have as much content as the main game, but players who used the subscription service could download and play for free. Call it a huge demo if you want.

Surprisingly, after the PlayStation Store updated this past Tuesday, players were surprised to see the free PS+ version absent from the game’s listing. So what happened?

As it turns out, this online focused racing game is having some online troubles. In a post on their Facebook page, Evolution Studios made the decision to pull the PS+ edition of the game and delay it until the server issues are under control. It seems that the servers are just getting hammered by the flood of new users and they’re reaching their performance and resource limits. So they’re limiting access to the game by delaying the PS+ edition (and the flood of even more new players) for now until these issues are worked out. Currently, at the time of this writing, there is no timetable in place but the studio has promised that they’re in “all hands on deck” mode to get this situation resolved.

Buyer beware, the game is also still widely available for full retail price but remember that with these server issues, your experience more than likely won’t be smooth. Hopefully this is something that can be resolved quickly, but I also can’t help wondering how they were not prepared before hand for the rush of new users flooding the servers. Seems like this generation has been marred by many online games having launch day issues over servers. I hope this isn’t a defining trend moving forward.